[ExI] Bender's Octopus (re: LLMs like ChatGPT)

[William Flynn Wallace]

I won't argue what a referent means.

I agree.  It is just what John would say but in different words:  he would
emphasize, as I do, that for definitions you need examples, and that is why
I, tongue not totally in cheek, wrote that you should give an AI a picture
dictionary.   bill w

On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 3:41 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Reading these conversations over the last few days, it has struck me
> that some people keep referring to 'real' things, usually using the word
> 'referents' (e.g. an apple), as though our brains had direct access to
> them and could somehow just know what they are.
>
> But we don't.
>
> Think about it, what is "An Apple"?
>
> It's a term that we associate with a large set of sensory and memory
> data, including language data, but mostly things like visual, textural,
> taste, smell, emotional, etc., data stored as memories.
>
> Seeing as we all have different memories associated with the label "An
> Apple" (because some of us were sick the first time we ate one, some of
> us are allergic to something in apples, some of us have a greater
> impression of sweetness, or sourness, when we eat one, some of us once
> discovered a maggot in one, some people have only ever eaten Granny
> Smiths, others only Braeburns, or Crab Apples, and so on and so on...),
> then 'An Apple' is a different thing to each of us.
>
> There is no spoon! Er, Apple. There is no Apple!
> Not as a 'real-world thing'.
>
> "An Apple" is an abstract concept that, despite the individual
> differences, most of us can agree on, because there are a lot of common
> features for each of us, such as general shape, some common colours, a
> set of smells and tastes, how we can use them, where we get them from,
> and so on.. The concept is represented internally, and communicated
> externally (to other people) by a linguistic label, that refers, for
> each of us, to this large bunch of data extracted from our senses and
> memories: "Una Manzana".
>
> It's all 'nothing but' Data. Yet we all think that we 'understand' what
> an Apple is. Based purely on this data in our brains (because we have
> access to nothing else).
>
> So this idea of a label having 'a referent' seems false to me. Labels
> (data in our heads) refer to a big set of data (in our heads). Where the
> data comes from is secondary, diverse, and quite distant, when you trace
> the neural pathways back to a large and disparate set of incoming
> sensory signals, scattered over space and time. The meaning is created
> in our minds, not resident in a single object in the outside world.
>
> This is my understanding of things, anyway.
>
> Ben
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